Chan Lowe: English-only police strike again

The idea of a Latin-themed pizza chain offering a good-natured promotion wouldn’t even be a news story, except that some knee-jerk English-only purists have decided to make an issue out of it.

Evidently, Pizza Patron’s giveaway of a free pepperoni pizza if you say the words, “Por favor,” is offensive to some Americans, in that it “discriminates” against those who speak English.

Two of the more delightful properties of American English, and part of what give it its pizzazz, are its elasticity and powers of absorption. That is, the way it so easily borrows foreign words and phrases and blends them into standard speech. Of course, this is due to our composition as a society of immigrants and their descendants; to deny the foreign influences on our language is to deny our heritage.

American English is a living thing, and it mutates, morphs and regenerates so quickly that any grammar or dictionary seeking to encompass it is obsolete before it can even be published. It is as wrong to pretend that the language we speak can be “protected” from change as it is to assert that plants and animals never evolve.

Come to think of it, those two concepts do tend to go hand in hand, don’t they?